Inexpensive Open Source Gifts

If you ask my girlfriend Christina what she wants for a gift, the immature yet invariable response is either a pony or a Vespa scooter. These items being a little pricey, me and others have opted to simply provide her their representations. I also recently had a hankering for some C++/OpenGL coding. This is the ideal situation to code a girly screen saver, but we're short on time so leverage some open source stuff:

• a public domain 3d model of a horse, in 3DS format


• an open source 3DS file loader & viewer for OpenGL, acquired from www.gametutorials.com


• an animated snow effect for OpenGL (also open source)

I quickly married it all together, making the the snow fall around the horse while it spins around the Z axis.

Its like a hybrid of a snow shaker and music box without the music or the shaking. Now a screensaver is really just an EXE renamed to SCR, so the final touch is to make the program exit on keyboard and mouse messages.

I've had the idea for a while to make my own OpenGL demo that goes with music, i.e. some sort of wild interactive visualization. After jumping back into OpenGL so easily and that recent success with MP3 decoding and analysis for the WWF, I don't see any big hurdles.